


No Matter Where You Stand (The Skyline Looks The Same)

by easystreets



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Found Family, Gen, M/M, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:42:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25276357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/easystreets/pseuds/easystreets
Summary: Dennis has never been very good at being a part of something.
Relationships: Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45
Collections: Gen Prompt Bingo Round 18





	No Matter Where You Stand (The Skyline Looks The Same)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings: suicidal thoughts, a near-suicide attempt, and Dennis being... Dennis. Written for the Gen Prompt Bingo (prompt: family).

Dennis’s first introduction to the concept of family occurs at a two-foot tall Formica table in the basement of St Augustine’s Preschool. 

Dee is sitting next to him, humming a song from their worn-out Beach Boys tape, and Dennis can’t focus. As a rule, Dee always sits next to him-- the other kids are even bigger babies than her-- and as a rule, she will always do something that worms its way under his skin and annoys him profoundly.

“Stop,” Dennis mutters, even though he knows she won’t. They’re supposed to be drawing a picture of their family for Father’s Day, but right now he can barely imagine them in his mind. He tries to think what colour Dad’s hair is; it’s scraggly and ocher, the same way the bad guy from the Smurfs’s hair looks. Dad is short, just like the detective from Inch High, Private Eye, the cartoon he watches on Sunday mornings. The brownish-black crayons and markers at this table are either too dark, or withered by the legions of preschoolers before him. He can’t find a crayon that’s the right shade, so he settles for snapping all the inferior ones in half.

“Your paper’s empty,” Dee unhelpfully points out. Dee sighs. “And you broke the red.”

He frowns at her picture. It’s… mediocre, and Dee is somehow the biggest person on the paper, sanctified by a golden outline around herself, cutting off Drawing Dennis’s arm. But she made something. Dennis can’t do anything.

He sighs. Their table, as usual, is empty, with all the other children clustered away by themselves, giving Dennis dirty looks for the destroyal of the stupid crayons. Suddenly, he decides to out-do them, to make the other kids revere him. They’ll be jealous of Dennis: all the toys in the world; the best at drawings and circle time; the line leader whenever they walk to the park across from St Augustine’s. He’ll be like God.

Dennis digs a dark blue into the crisp printer paper. He watches with glee as waxy pieces of crumbled crayon smear onto the table. With a steady hand, he draws a boy. Around the boy, just like Dee’s actualization of herself, he draws a zig-zag outline. It looks more like a cage than anything, but the boy in Dennis’s picture is smiling: he looks serene, safe within the one-dimensional confines of paper and Crayola. 

“Is that really your whole family?” asks Mrs. Adler, his idiot teacher, when he presents it to her.

Dennis nods. If family means people who understand you, then Dennis is alone.

***

“Let me get a photo of you two.”

Brian is halfway through a slice of Spiderman themed birthday cake when Dennis reluctantly scoops him up. He’s tall now; when he kicks his legs in protest he nails Dennis in the knee.

“Come on, Brian,” Dennis whispers in his ear. He tries to think of what to say that will just stop the crying without traumatizing Brian and making him hate Dennis.

It’s a fucking short list. He doesn’t exactly have a lot of source material to draw on, either, what with Mom and Frank being possibly the shittiest parents ever, aside from himself. He fidgets Brian in his arms, tries bouncing him. Frank would’ve whispered threats by now, maybe whipped out a gun. Everyone carries here; Frank would so love North Dakota and it makes him sick, because Dennis loves it a little, parts of it at least, and it’s shit like that that makes him Frank’s son.

“Please be quiet,” Dennis tries. Brian, like most toddlers, is adverse to reason, and it only makes him scream louder. Mandy’s parents are glaring now; four of her seven siblings are pointedly looking away, the other three gossiping in a semi-circle. They're probably talking about him. Brian is hot and heavy in his arms, a flailing bundle of energy. “Please.”

Mandy, like always, notices his helplessness. “Dennis, just give him a hug.” Mandy, like always, gives him the tools to deal with it and leaves him to figure it out on his own.

He wraps his arms around Brian. “Oh,” says Dennis, when the crying stops. The party has whirred back into a quiet hum of gossip and Top 40 hits. He feels better. 

She snaps the photo, and Brian scampers off to finish his cake and play with his cousins. He hopes Brian doesn’t remember his third birthday in the vivid, painful way that Dennis remembers his childhood.

“I’m going to go take a smoke,” Dennis says, because smoking is his new thing. Mandy calls them cancer sticks, says it’s like sticking a loaded gun in your mouth, and shes’s probably right. He doesn’t care, though, and that’s what she’s wrong about.

“Be safe!” he hears her call, as he stares at the busy road by their house. Lots of travelers whir past with maps spread across the dashboard, blatantly ignoring the CHILDREN AT PLAY sign or the several traffic cones Mandy’s scattered throughout the street. 

All Dennis can think about is the impact one of the cars speeding impatiently would have on him: would it string him apart, like roadkill? Would it simply snap his bones? Would it hurt? He thinks he wants it to. 

He frowns at the cars. He doesn’t want to die at the hands of a shitty Toyota truck, and he’s pretty sure there isn’t any killing power in a Volkswagen. There’s a truck that looks promising, but it zooms ahead before he can throw himself in front of it. He’s nearly settled on running in front of the next minivan he sees when Mandy calls his name.

“Dennis!” Mandy motions for him to come over, and he does. “Family photo time.”

“I-- I’m not part of your family,” he says, because he isn’t. Mandy’s mom won’t speak to him, and her dad has already given him plenty of shit about being a family man and keeping his head out of the bottle. The only family member of hers that Dennis remotely gets along with is her cousin, Royce, who’s currently in the county jail and is also Dennis’s best dealer. 

“Don’t be silly!” she says, positioning him just so. He feels painfully out of place. “You’re Brian’s dad!”

Later, Dennis tucks Brian in. If this is family, then it was never meant for him.  
***

Mac is probably the worst roommate ever. Well, Charlie did once have that Schmitty thing-- Dennis erased Charlie’s erratic phone calls about the way Schmitty buttered his toast and tied his shoes, but they certainly have not left his memory-- and he’s certain that sharing a room with Dee again would be a living hell, but Mac is terrible.

“I don’t understand it,” Mac is saying. Mac never understands anything. “It’s like, I pay a shit ton of taxes. I should be able to park anywhere. And it’s not like there was a sign saying it was an ambulance bay.”

“Yeah,” Dennis concedes. Thankfully, Mac is silent, staring down at the astronomically expensive parking ticket. “A thousand bucks, huh?”

“It’s ‘cause I was double-parked in the ambulance bay and a disabled spot.” Mac shrugs sheepishly, fidgeting with a pen. “And it was your car, so it wasn’t insured under me or anything.”

Jesus. Dennis has got to get better friends. One of these days, he and Mac are going to have a blowout fight, and he’s finally gonna kick Mac out. Or Mac will just… leave, hopefully. It’s been nearly thirty years, but there’s still hope that one day Dennis will break it. There’s almost an expectation. Mac is incessantly stupid and bossy and seems to have made a disturbingly large niche for himself in Dennis’s life. He lies his head down on the kitchen table and wonders if it’s too early to call the entire day off.

“Dennis?” Mac says, touching his shoulder-blades through the fabric of his sweater. He hopes for his own sake that they aren’t too prominent for Mac’s liking; Dennis doesn’t want Mac leaving around pamphlets for nutritionist’s offices again. Mac caresses him the way Dennis likes to touch girls at first: softly, but with a hint of firmness, so that they know who’s who. “Are you mad at me?”

Dennis is pissed. He’s hungover, and the sun peeking in through the windows is making him squint. Mac’s hand is unbearably soft on his back; he wishes that he didn’t like it. He wants-- he wants to feel nothing. He wants to punch the table and watch a web of splintered wood bloom in his palm. He wants to shatter plates; the knife block on the kitchen counter is looking like the beginning of a great idea.

He sighs. “It’s okay.” It’s really not at all okay, because he hates feeling this way. Anger has a way of being exhausting. The weird thing Mac does-- asking if he’s eaten; opening the windows in Dennis’s bedroom when he’s had a bad week; badgering him about doctors and therapists-- is sometimes tolerable, but mostly furtive, which Mac seems incapable of understanding.

“You know, Dennis,” Mac says quietly, like when he’s reading from that stupid dog-eared Bible of his, like when he came out of the closet for the last time. “You’re like my blood brother.”

And because Dennis doesn’t know what to say, he reaches for Mac’s hand instead. The steady pulse is comforting. He closes his eyes. The soft touch is nearly painful.

When he opens his eyes, and can feel the burning embarrassment of being so fragile, so damn keyed up all of the time, Mac is smiling back at him with a knowing look, rubbing his thumb across Dennis’s bruised knuckles, saying nothing about the blood underneath his fingernails or the paleness of his skin.

Dennis squeezes tighter. This, then, is family: not knowing, but understanding anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> If you have comments, I'd love to hear them here or on Dreamwidth (sometimessunny is my username). where I yell about these idiots on occasion! Thanks for reading!


End file.
